Customer Rating:  
Summary: great present
Comment: This was a Christmas present for my husband and he thought it works, looks and performs great ! He loves the orange color too. It it compact and comes with a carrying case. It is a great present.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Eton Crank Radio
Comment: It does what it says it does, ie. you can run it by winding it up. What it doesn't seem to have is much of a front-end (tuning capacity). Local NPR station here which I can receive on every other radio in the house is a sometime thing on this machine. I also have great difficulty receiving the National Weather Channels.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Pretty Good
Comment: I expected to have the TV channels but I guess they may have changed to product due to the conversion to digital broadcasting. I really wanted the cell phone charger which you send for after designating your cell make and model.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Works Great
Comment: This product works great! Twice this summer we were alerted of tornadoes in our area and we had time to get to the basement for safety. The product is easy to use but I wish it would come with the AC adapter instead of having to order it seperately. I just bought one for my parents who just went through the hurricane in Texas and had no way to get emergency reports once the power went down.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A quirky variant on the Grundig FR-200
Comment: This is the Eton FR-300, which is actually a slightly modified variant of the Grundig FR-200. The only reason I bought the 300 is because my local Radio Shack was out of the FR-200 (aside: I wanted to get a 2nd one for my garage - the other being in the laundry room). Anyway, I decided to roll the dice and see if the it was significantly better. Unfortunately, it isn't.
THE GOOD:
* Sound quality: Although mono, it's adequate.
* Battery life: The unit uses three AA batteries, plus a small plasti-sealed NiCad pack (about the size of an olive) for the recharge crank. I've been able to run the radio for an hour or two each day, for several weeks, before having to change the AA's. {BTW, I use Tenergy 2600 miliamphr NiMHi AA's in this, and they work great}. I rarely use the crank-driven NiCad, but it's runtime is rather modest - 90 sec of cranking yeilds around 60-75 mins of listening ... at a very modest volume.
* Portability is good.
THE MEDIOCRE:
* TUNING: {minus 1 star) The pre-printed plastic frequency indicator on mine is better aligned than the one on the Grundig FR-200 I own, but it's still rather innacurate, and the tuner's performance is underwhelming - unable to tune in all but the most powerful of my local stations, and unable to prevent nearby station frequencys to bleed into each other. I'd happily have paid 2-3x as much for a comparable radio with a digital tuner and a minimal LCD readout ... which would have only a modest impact to total battery runtime.
* CHARGING: (minus 1 star) The smallish handcrank generator, although slightly better than the Grundig FR-200, is still rather clumsy to use, and having to spend 1 second out of every 45-60 cranking like a crazed chimp, charging a dinky little NiCad mini-cell, is irritating. One minor improvement over the Grundig is a round jack that allows charging of certain models of cell phones ... HOWEVER, only a small minority of phones are compatible with it, so the feature will be all but useless to the majority of people. Also, I would have liked an additional feature that'd allow you to directly charge instead the three AA's via a built-in smart charger connected to a universal power input ... thus enabling recharging (or direct play) from things like you're car's cigarette lighter, a portable generator, a PC, a portable roll-up solar pad, etc. I'm pretty sure there are newer versions of this sort of radio that have a larger & more ergonomic crank mounted to the rear, as well as solar recharge capability/compatibility. This model, as of this writing, has fallen behind the latest technology trends.
* OTHER FEATURES: Other added features over the Grundig are VHF TV reception (how obsolete), several weather channels (useful), and a small siren (why ?).
All in all, this model is just a slightly more expensive variant on the Grundig FR-200, with a few extra, but mostly useless, tweaks and additions. I found it underwhelming, and not worth the extra cost over the FR-200.
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